ViroBlogy

And so the inevitable happens, and a sick little boy dies – from Australian bat lyssavirus infection.

Now, while I keep going on about "flying rats", one needs to get the "bat threat" in perspective: ONE child died in recent history due to a bat-borne rabies-like virus, and FOUR people since 1994 of bat-borne Hendra virus.  Yet people are calling for a cull: that’s right up there with the "kill all Great White Sharks" campaigns there have been over the years, for a threat of death of injury that is considerably less than you expereince every morning driving to work.

" "the policy aims to preserve the benefits of life sciences research while minimizing the risk of misuse.""

OK – can’t argue too hard with that, I suppose?  EXCEPT that it probably limits access to the research of countries where the virus is ACTUALLY a problem.

Just shows you the sheer scale of the effort – nearly a million babies in ONE district in India! – still needed to contain a virus that was almost eradicated.  Almost, that is, until politics and selfish policies made people in neighbouring Pakistan suspicious of vaccinators.

This is an interesting paper, because it is one of the ONLY ones I have ever seen that analyses ANYTHING to do with the 1918 H1N1 pandemic, that comes from a developing country.  Moreover, it makes what I think is possibly quite a valuable contribution to "health geographics", especially for high-denisty low-income populations.

I also note that 15 MILLION PEOPLE were estimated to have died in India ALONE: this is close to the old estimate for the WORLD total (20 million), which was revised upwards to 50-100 million after developing country stats were taken into account, in the late 1990s.

Makes you think what a new version might do….